The land that turbines are built on
When wind powers private profits, people resist and insist that land is a scarce, common resource
Hi, and welcome back to the series on the commons, a series about people who resist the idea that energy is a commodity, a simple good that could be bought and sold in the ‘free market’, and most importantly, that it could be something that some could profit off. "Industrial wind power is a financial windfall for unscrupulous people", the head of the Association for the Protection of the South Gâtinais Plateau (just south of Paris) thus explained their objection to wind turbines in the area.
Of course, it’s not just about the energy itself (whether it’s electrons or some kind of fuel). It’s also about the infrastructure and — especially — the land on which that infrastructure is built. As we saw two editions ago, the privatization of land was a kind of original commodifier. After privatization, the landowner had exclusive use-rights of that land, free to grow vegetal or animal commodities. (Meanwhile, the time and effort of those who used to work that land was now also ready to be sold as commodity.) As I mentioned then, this process of privatization of previously publicly accessible land has been called the enclosure of the commons.
That process still occurs today across the world. In the opening email or this series on the commons, I mentioned the case of Mexico's hyper valuable winds, where violence and deceit are used to push for wind farm development, and local people are excluded both from the land the turbines are built on and the benefits they generate. This exclusion, dispossession and displacement is possible precisely because land ownership there is contentious, with land divided among elites in the 1970s and ‘80s without legal basis or local legitimacy. When these elites now manage to host wind parks on those tracts (if necessary with newly minted land titles), they’re the ones who profit, giving the expression “living off the land” doubtful new meaning. Others pauperize. (Torres Contreras 2021; Serna 2021)
As one of the most valuable wind corridors on the planet, these enclosures of common lands is particularly stark, but we can witness pressures on common land build up elsewhere too. In a (much earlier) newsletter I briefly covered the case of a “mega” solar park in Gujarat, India, “another example of the dispossession of people from their livelihoods in the name of progressive development.” (Komali Yenneti and colleagues, 2016) Authorities side-stepped existing legal protections of land-use, while developers tricked vulnerable populations into giving up privately owned land, depriving locals of their agricultural and pastoral use of these lands.
In Turkey, there is a legally recognized type of common land that would translate to something like “pasture”: “lands which were previously assigned for the public use or which were used as pastures since the ancient times”. Villages or rural towns can use them for grazing or horticulture. It turns out that this category succumbs quite easily to the pressure of private profit from wind park developments, especially given Turkey’s strong developmentalist regime that prefers opportunities for capital accumulation over ‘unproductive use’. So, the central state can simply reclassify the land from rural to urban (as has happened on the windy peripheries of İzmir, Turkey’s third largest city), erasing any “pasture” from the paper record. (Local jurisdictions, by the way, also find exceptions to the care with which they are entrusted towards the agricultural commons.) As a consequence of the construction and operation of the turbines, locals see their land reduced. (Hazar Kolonya & Özçam 2021)
Note that while states, elites and developers can impose their designs on the land more often than not, the resistance they provoke can shape the trajectory of development. How much influence local residents can exert depends on property regimes, on political culture and the economics of wind power.
Let me show you this in a little more detail by taking you back to the Gâtinais Plateau in France. Power differences are less stark there and there isn’t a very explicit common land regime. But conflict over newly proposed wind turbines did show the importance of common pool resource management and the sense of shared public space. In fact, the contestation led to a more acutely articulated value of what is in common.
The Windy Town
The plateau is populated by a number of (farming) villages and rural towns. In one of those villages, dubbed Ventville by authors Alain Nadaï and Olivier Labussière 😏, two farmers contacted a developer to build the turbines on their respective land. In order to understand how and why conflict ensued, you need to know these three things:
Agricultural land, while held privately, is periodically rearranged. When land is passed on to a new generation in the family, it gets split up. In order to prevent fragmentation, the farmers have therefore set up a dedicated association to reshuffle the tracts of lands among themselves, to ensure the greatest possible contiguity. As a consequence, what is my land now, could be yours tomorrow.
Residents have a close relationship to the land, “valued by hunters for sport and by villagers for their Sunday walk”. There is therefore both a sense of belonging and of a landscape that is a “shared resource”.
Ventville and towns like it are small communities, so public and private life intersects and overlaps: “the voter is a neighbour, the farmer is a colleague and a Sunday stroller, the wind power opponent is a relative or a friend.”
Now, how did conflict ensue? In brief: not very well. “Our village used to be famous for its very good atmosphere”, one resident bitterly recollected. When the authors arrived, they found village life “dislocated”.
Commons, commonification, and the public good
How did it get this bad? In three ways, the process failed to do justice to what people held in common.
To start, the choice of two farmers to plant turbines on their land was seen as a violation of the common governance of the agricultural plains, because it would trip up any future reshuffling. Who would receive the rents then? What should we do with the cables in the ground? Whose problem are those? These farmers privatized their historically contingent claim to a piece of land. In addition, they wholly side-stepped the association by dealing directly with the mayor on this question.
Meanwhile, some residents became more and more “political”, through organized opposition. This was essentially the result of attempts of the mayor to manage the permitting process ‘privately’, sitting down with individual families, arranging in-home presentations by the developer, basically treating it as an affair that would be arranged among the families. In other words, by refusing to make it public. But people with concerns wanted to see their questions answered in due public process. When that didn’t happen, residents from different villages linked up and got involved with the association quoted at the beginning of this letter. Together they marked out territories that were to be off limits for wind turbines. They started monitoring these territories in order to defend it against incursions.
Such a collective organization marks a change in this shared resource from the status of a plateau to that of a commons. Admittedly, an emergent commons, perhaps a temporary commons, yet a commons that allows for challenging French wind power policy, its emphasis on energy production and its lack of transparency in local arbitration. (Nadaï and Labussière, p. 813)
The failure of the mayor to organize a public consultation is not a personal failure per se. It takes place in the absence of an adequate regulatory context. Like in Turkey, the central state is tasked with the protection of the rural landscape as a “public good”. Bit similar to Turkey, the (nationally promoted) pressure from wind development is stronger than the institutional fences built around this good. The authors show nicely that the case-by-case rulings that ban turbines in one place sends developers searching for a fall-back location, where the same tensions are bound to resurface. In this game of whack-a-mole common interests are bound to lose. The only way for them to win is to change the game.
Just procedures, revisited
The article is good reading for anyone in search of a refresher of why NIMBYism is a bad framework for understanding “opposition” to wind power. Here, as in many other cases, opposition is not a preceding position that people occupy (“I'm not against wind development, I just don't think it should be here”), but “opposing” is a result of not having one’s concerns heard.
The literature on siting renewable infrastructure emphasises just procedures — giving all stakeholders a voice in the proceedings and making sure they’re heard — as a way to prevent the kind of dislocating conflict that “opposition” can entail. But perhaps those in charge of implementing such procedures would be helped by a different kind of normative underpinning too, that of the commons. An underpinning that also does justice to people’s sense that energy should not be a commodity, and shared landscapes should not be treated as private property only.
In that spirit, Nadaï and Labussière build on this case to argue that wind energy policy needs good landscape policy. Wind may be renewable, they quip, but (shared) land certainly isn’t.
Thanks for reading! Next up: how can you manage energy as a common pool resource?
Best,
Marten